Neat1 promotes acute kidney injury to chronic kidney disease by facilitating tubular epithelial cells apoptosis via sequestering miR-129-5p.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is increasingly identified as a crucial risk factor for progression to CKD. However, the factors governing AKI to CKD progression remain largely unknown. By high-throughput RNA sequencing, we found that Neat1_2, a transcript variant of Neat1, was upregulated in 40-min ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI), which resulted in the development of renal fibrotic lesions. The upregulation of Neat1_2 in hypoxia-treated TECs was attributed to p53 transcriptional regulation. Gain- and loss-of-function studies, both in vitro and in vivo, demonstrated that Neat1_2 promoted apoptosis of injured TECs induced by IRI and caused tubulointerstitial inflammation and fibrosis. Mechanistically, Neat1_2 shares miRNA response elements with FADD, CASP-8, and CASP-3. Neat1_2 competitively binds to miR-129-5p and prevents miR-129-5p from decreasing the levels of FADD, CASP-8, and CASP-3, and ultimately facilitates TEC apoptosis. Increased expression of Neat1_2 associated with kidney injury and TEC apoptosis was recapitulated in human AKI, highlighting its clinical relevance. These findings suggest that preventing TEC apoptosis by hindering Neat1_2 expression may be a potential therapeutic strategy for AKI to CKD progression.

Research on path planning for clear aligner flexible manufacturing.

In recent years, clear aligner can enhance individual appearance with dental defects, so it used more and more widely. However, in manufacturing process, there are still some problems, such as low degree of automation and high equipment cost. The problem of coordinate system mismatch between gingival curve point cloud and dental CAD model is faced to. The PCA-ICP registration algorithm is proposed, which includes coarse match algorithm and improve-ICP registration algorithm. The principal component analysis (PCA) based method can roughly find the posture relationship between the two point clouds. Using z-level dynamic hierarchical, the ICP registration can accurately find the posture between these two clouds. The final registration maximum distance error is 0.03 mm, which is smaller than robot machining error. Secondly, the clear aligner machining process is conducted to verify the registration effectiveness. Before machining, the path is generated based on the well registered gingival curve. After full registration, the tool path is calculated by establishing a local coordinate system between the workpiece and the tool to avoid interference. This path is calculated and generated as an executable program for ABB industrial robots. Finally, the robot was used for flexible cutting of clear aligners and was able to extract products, ensuring the effectiveness of the proposed research. This method can effectively solve the limitations of traditional milling path planning under such complex conditions.

Research on sentiment classification for netizens based on the BERT-BiLSTM-TextCNN model.

Sentiment analysis of netizens' comments can accurately grasp the psychology of netizens and reduce the risks brought by online public opinion. However, there is currently no effective method to solve the problems of short text, open word range, and sometimes reversed word order in comments. To better solve the above problems, this article proposes a hybrid model of sentiment classification, which is based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and a text convolution neural network (TextCNN) (BERT-BiLSTM-TextCNN). The experimental results show that (1) the hybrid model proposed in this article can better combine the advantages of BiLSTM and TextCNN; it not only captures local correlation while retaining context information but also has high accuracy and stability. (2) The BERT-BiLSTM-TextCNN model can extract important emotional information more flexibly in text and achieve multiclass classification tasks of emotions more accurately. The innovations of this study are as follows: (1) the use of BERT to generate word vectors has the advantages of more prior information and a full combination of contextual semantics; (2) the BiLSTM model, as a bidirectional context mechanism model, can obtain contextual information well; and (3) the TextCNN model can obtain important features well in the problem of text classification, and the combined effect of the three modules can significantly improve the accuracy of emotional multilabel classification.

Circular RNA circBNC2 inhibits epithelial cell G2-M arrest to prevent fibrotic maladaptive repair.

The mechanisms underlying fibrogenic responses after injury are not well understood. Epithelial cell cycle arrest in G2/M after injury is a key checkpoint for determining wound-healing leading to either normal cell proliferation or fibrosis. Here, we identify a kidney- and liver-enriched circular RNA, circBNC2, which is abundantly expressed in normal renal tubular cells and hepatocytes but significantly downregulated after acute ischemic or toxic insult. Loss of circBNC2 is at least partially mediated by upregulation of DHX9. Gain- and loss-of-function studies, both in vitro and in vivo, demonstrate that circBNC2 acts as a negative regulator of cell G2/M arrest by encoding a protein that promotes formation of CDK1/cyclin B1 complexes. Restoring circBNC2 in experimentally-induced male mouse models of fibrotic kidney and liver, decreases G2/M arrested cell numbers with secretion of fibrotic factors, thereby mitigating extracellular matrix deposition and fibrosis. Decreased expression of circBNC2 and increased G2/M arrest of epithelial cells are recapitulated in human ischemic reperfusion injury (IRI)-induced chronic kidney disease and inflammation-induced liver fibrosis, highlighting the clinical relevance. These findings suggest that restoring circBNC2 might represent a potential strategy for therapeutic intervention in epithelial organ fibrosis.

[Epidemiological survey on bronchial asthma in Henan province].

OBJECTIVE: To survey asthma prevalence, correlation factors for prevention, treatment, and for policy decision of asthma control. METHODS: Done with TB epidemiological survey synchronously, sampling by stratified-cluster-random method. 43 points were selected and distributed in all 18 prefectures in Henan province. Sampling population was 75 134, and 65 033 (97.0%) were investigated actually. RESULTS: In this survey, 682 asthma patients were found. The total prevalence rate was 1.05%, the rate for children was 1.71%, and that for adult was 0.82%; the rates for male and female were 1.16%, 0.94% respectively. The ratio of male to female was 1.23:1. When asthmatic chronic bronchitis cases were regarded as asthma cases and included in total asthma cases, the overall prevalence rate of asthma would increase up to 1.73%, raised by 65%. The higher prevalence were in 0 approximately 3 years old age group (4.48%) and >/= 65 years old age group (1.43%), the lowest prevalence was in 15 approximately 24 years old age group (0.36%). For 90% of asthmatic children, the initiative age of asthma was before 7 years old, and for 1/3 adult patient, it was in childhood. The prevalence of asthma in rural area was higher than that of urban area. Cold air, common cold, stimulation of smoking and cooking, and room dust were the 4 main inducing factors. Seasonal attack of asthma accounted for 67.2%, and that in winter and spring was 65.4%. 60.6% of asthma cases showed history of allergic diseases including allergic rhinitis, dermatitis, and drug allergy; 34.3% asthma family history. CONCLUSIONS: The rate of prevalence and inducing factors of asthma in Henan province were gained in this survey. The results may basically reflect the present status and be provided for asthma control as reference. According to the prevalence, asthma cases would be up to 0.98 approximately 1.6 million in whole Henan province and more attention should be paid to this situation.

Use of a novel multiplex probe array for rapid identification of Mycobacterium species from clinical isolates.

Conventional identification of mycobacteria is based on the analysis of their phenotypic and biochemical characteristics after culture; thus this method is time-consuming, laborious, and is not always conclusive. Developing a fast and accurate method for rapid identification of Mycobacterium species is in urgent need for early diagnosis of mycobacteriosis and effective patient management. In this study, an efficient and affordable novel multiplex probe array which allows simultaneous identification of 15 medically important mycobacterial species was developed. A pair of genus-specific primers and a set of genus- and species-specific probes were designed according to the conserved and polymorphic regions of the 16S rRNA gene, internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequence, and 23S rRNA gene of mycobacteria. This probe array was applied for the identification of 78 clinical mycobacterial isolates recovered from Henan, China. The results showed that the specificity and sensitivity of the probe array were 100% for both genus-specific probe and Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex-specific probe. Among 52 isolates of nontuberculous mycobacteria, 43 isolates (82.7%) can be rapidly identified to the species level. Genetic variability of 16S-23S rRNA gene ITS region in M. avium, M. intracellulare, M. chelonae, M. abscessus and M. fortuitum were analyzed. With the accumulation of the sequences of ITS identified and further optimization of probes, the multiplex probe array has the potential to be developed into a practical tool for rapid and accurate identification of mycobacterial species in clinical laboratory.